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Early Music America has named Les Délices Artistic Director Debra Nagy as the 2022 recipient of the Laurette Goldberg Award for Outstanding Achievement in Early Music Outreach for her work on SalonEra.

Poet, composer, and protofeminist — these are all accurate labels, but they only begin to describe the incredible Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Known as “The Phoenix of Mexico” and “The Tenth Muse,” de la Cruz led a fascinating life and left behind a legacy that artists of all kinds continue to explore today.

Last year, Cleveland’s period ensemble Les Délices dared to be different with their contribution to the world of online concerts: SalonEra. Billed as a “variety show for early music,” the web series’ unique format made it a hit among audience members, director Debra Nagy said in a recent interview.

If you were feeling starved for a really arresting musical experience online in recent months and caught an episode of SalonEra, you were in luck. Every two weeks from September to May, Cleveland’s baroque chamber ensemble Les Délices presented 16 lively episodes of wide-ranging period music from medieval days to the early 19th century with performers from far and wide.

Women, studies show, work harder than men. Even when they and their male spouses or partners have equally demanding jobs, women shoulder more of the housework and childcare duties. As a rewarding pair of online programs from the Cleveland-based early music organization Les Délices demonstrates, female composers of the 17th and 18th centuries wouldn’t have been surprised by today’s gender gaps. They lived — and resourcefully sought ways to thrive — under similar and surely far more daunting conditions.

Exploring the dramatic potential and emotional resonance of early music, Les Délices (The delights), founded in 2009 by Baroque oboist Debra Nagy, has, like all arts organizations, found itself at an inflection point during the COVID-19 crisis. But that hasn’t stopped Cleveland-based Nagy from making the proverbial lemonade from lemons. Indeed, the ensemble’s SalonEra series, a unique online variety show, brings together a roster of national and international artists in a combination of live performances, prerecorded content, and captivating dialogue generally not found in your typical pandemic/YouTube/Zoom musical offerings.